How To Use A Mage/Sorc Effectively
GeeBaws
Member Posts: 2
Hi,
Finished SOA a couple of times now but i never feel i use my arcane casters effectively.
Majority of the time i have them learn the basic Defensive spells, Stoneskin, Mirror image etc. but i hardly ever use them
But for offensive spells i normally only choose Area spells (Skull Trap, Cloud Kill etc.) However since these have friendly fire i often limit or dont even cast them 75% of the time.
So for many fights through the games i just have them equiped with ranged weapons and casting Magic Missile randomly at their targets.
How can i use my casters more effectively? as i feel there wasting a slot in my partys..
Finished SOA a couple of times now but i never feel i use my arcane casters effectively.
Majority of the time i have them learn the basic Defensive spells, Stoneskin, Mirror image etc. but i hardly ever use them
But for offensive spells i normally only choose Area spells (Skull Trap, Cloud Kill etc.) However since these have friendly fire i often limit or dont even cast them 75% of the time.
So for many fights through the games i just have them equiped with ranged weapons and casting Magic Missile randomly at their targets.
How can i use my casters more effectively? as i feel there wasting a slot in my partys..
2
Comments
Arcane casters are totally dominant in BG 2, and using mages well will make ur life so much easier...
The no1 purpose of mages in BG 2 is penetrating enemy protections, especially other mages, your typical approach to a mage battle should be:
1) Dispel Invisibility/Illusions... as enemy mages love to use Mislead in contingencies. So opening with True Sight is usually a good bet.
2) Pierce Magic Protections. I am not expert enough to remember specifics, but basically Pierce Magic, Warding Whip, Ruby Ray of Reversal, Pierce Shield and Spell Strike to take down protections like Spell Turning, Globe of Invulnerability, etc...
3) Breach to take down Combat protections like Stoneskin and Protection from Magic Weapons. Once you've done this enemies that usually make Minsc say "I need a bigger sword?!" will drop before his "buttkicking for goodness!".
I consider that to be the central purpose of mages, but beyond that there's all sorts of powerful strategies u can use.
1) Melf's Minute Meteors are amazing for a lv3 spell. They count as +5 weapons, allowing them to hit many enemies that otherwise have very high enchantment immunities.
2) Sequencers and Spell Triggers can be used both offensively and defensively, depending on what spells u load in them. Unless u reload every time u get surprised anyway, I love how u can quickly buff ur party with 1 or 2 sequencers if u get caught by surprise.
3) Many BG 2 foes have good magic resistance and saving throws. If u want ur AoE attacks to do much damage, or for stuff like Web to work, open with a Greater Mallison. A Greater Mallison combined with Horrid Wilting is utterly devastating, doing a good 70-90 dmg to enemies when they fail their saving throw. For single tough individual foes, Lower Resistance also makes them vulnerable to spell damage, so it's not a bad idea to load a Spell Trigger with Lower Resistance and Greater Mallison to open a tough battle.
4) U can use Invisibility spells to sneak past battles u'd prefer not to fight, or get into position for a lethal first strike. (Obviously depends on if the enemy has innate True Sight-like abilities or casts the spell). Mislead and Project Image can be very cheesy/effective in this regard, and Simulacrum is absolutely ridiculous.
There's probably a lot more that I've missed... just some ideas to get ya going
It's worth spending a bit of time going through the spellbook. Pay particular attention to save modifiers on offensive spells, and sentences like "not affected by magic resistance". With Greater Malison (drops all enemy saves by 4) a lowly 1st level spell like Spook can have powerful enemies running for their mamas.
As @Heindrich1988 says, your first priority as caster is to drop enemy defences, allowing your sword swingers to mop up.
Also, don't underestimate summoning spells.. High level enemies will just death spell them away, but that's one round where they aren't casting maze, imprisonment, meteor swarm or some other game-ending hellstorm...
(Edit: And Breach is *amazing*!)
That obviously depends on how much u wanna challenge urself. I try to limit myself to 'realistic rest' rules. For weak enemies where magic is not needed, I just let the swords/bows do the work. There are ridiculously powerful spells at the epic levels, so if u rest after every battle, every battle would follow the same pattern.
1) Improved Alacrity, Timestop,
2) Spell Trigger: Lower Res X2, Greater Mallison
3) Horrid Wilting X 2
4) Minor Sequencer (MMsX2),
5) Minute Meteors, attack with meteors...
Encounter over. Which would get boring quickly.
Realistic rest makes me need to think about when to use different spells.
Edit: Oh yeah this is also why I love Multi-class or Dual-class mages from Fighters. It means they can be very capable in melee when 'serious magic' is not needed.
My party consists of:
Fighter/Mage
Imoen
Aerie
Anomen
Jaheira
Minsc
So that's 3 arcane casters and 3 divine casters (Aerie counts as both), and yet Anomen, Jaheira and Charname are both very capable fighters as well as spellcasters.
Contrast this with a party from a LP I watched.
Wild Mage Charname
Imoen
Nalia
Viconia
Mazzy
Jaheira
It had access to higher level spells before me, which is nice, but with only Mazzy and Jaheira holding the line with much reliability, it was very reliant on summoning spells to provide meat shields, whilst spells were needed for almost every encounter.
A few party-friendly AOE spells after that include Glitterdust, Slow (it's got a nice -4 save penalty) and Chaos. All of these will soften up much of SOA nicely. Greater Malison -> Slow is still pretty effective into TOB. Slowed enemies have penalites to AC and THAC0, making them easy prey for your melee. It's counterintuitive but your fighters actually do a lot more damage than your casters, but casters have the tools to make enemies easy to hit.
Much of using an arcane caster effectively comes from understanding the spells available to you at each level. Some have only a couple of good picks, while others have a plethora. Level 8, for example, has Abi-Dalzim's Horrid wilting (an excellent spell) but most of the rest is a bit meh. I'd suggest having a look through both these forums and a listing of the spells available in the manual or Gamebanshee.
Yesterday I started SCS and will have to completely rethink that approach... still in Chateau Irenicus and already pondering my 4th CHARNAME and party setup to compensate for the increased difficulty!
I am actually surprised to see some of u say u've completed SoA several times, but never used mages much... cos for me, short of using cheesy tactics like triggering a battle and waiting for mage protections to time out before u actually get stuck in, I'd have no idea how to win certain tricky mage battles without mages of my own. At the very least, as I said, u need mages to penetrate defences so ur warriors/missile characters can take them down.
Personally in my first playthrough I've tried a quite a lot of different spells, and have fairly balanced spellbooks for tactical flexibility (cos I'm playing blind and don't know what to expect). The stuff that I haven't tried include all sorts of death spells (because I don't know which enemies they'd work against), spells that could cost u loot (Disintegration, Flesh to Stone, Imprisonment etc) and transformation spells (cos I don't like the idea of my characters turning into monsters, even if it is effective.)
In the LP I watched concurrently with my own playthrough, the player uses summons much more than me, and also Mislead/Simulacrum type spells, as he is less strict about cheesy tactics and resting than me. (But he does roleplay some pretty serious penalties too that I don't enforce on myself.)
@Corvino obviously loves AoE disabling spells. I personally like Web, but I don't like using Chaos/Horror type spells because despite being magic heavy, my party dishes out most of the damage via melee with Charname, Anomen and Minsc (and later Jaheira too). So I find it annoying to have enemies running away in all directions, possibly drawing me into further mobs or traps. If I had more of a ranged party, it would be less of a problem I guess.
My point is that learning to use the magic system can be really rewarding, and discovering your own style is for me, one of the biggest appeals of this game. With the exception of a very select few spells that everyone needs (Breach), and no-brainers like Minute Meteors and Horrid Wilting, you can achieve your goals with whatever you prefer.
I especially like Time Stop or Summon Fallen Planetar when the game decides to spawn mind flayers or other nasties right on top of my party. Get one of those spells off and you're safe. Without a mage... ouch
For many of the easier fights though, I just send in my melee specialists and let them handle it. Maybe I'll throw Improved Haste on them first. No point in going all out with magic all the time.
I've always struggled with Dispel cos I am never sure 'what can be dispelled', and the fact that it also strips the party of buffs makes it kinda hard to aim.
There's been so many occasions where I have Jaheira throw a Dispel, it fails to cure whatever disabling effect I was hoping to remove, or remove enemy protections, and instead Anomen's lost his Resist Fear... T_T
It compares the level of the person who casts dispel magic to the person who cast the original spell. The thing about inquisitors is that they cast dispel at TWO TIMES their character level!
So a level 10 Keldorn's dispel is BETTER than a level 20 Jaheira's, since it is also basically an instant cast.
That's not even to mention True Sight!
PS Here is the description: "Base chance is 50%. For every level caster of dispel magic is above caster of dispelled spell chance grow by 5% for every level below drops 10%. There is always at least 1% chance of failure or success"
So multi-class Jaheira would have a pretty useless dispel, while a fast-leveling bard or an inquisitor (or Yeslick) would have an incredible dispel magic.
Like... I was pretty shocked myself at the insane damage that Fireshield does. I never really thought much about it, and my plan was for Nalia to tank the
Keldorn was all the anti mage tools ive ever needed, leaving mages free to just focus on damage spells. Like i said though this may change on higher difficulty but on "core" i didnt have any problem with the point and kill tactic.. Except for mind flayers!!!
I did employ some cheesy tactics at the end.. Spell Trigger (or the same spell one level lower, Forgot its name) and 3x skull trap. It just cuts everything apart before it moves, if you have auto pause enemy sighted turned on at least. Mages have never really been a huge problem due to a fairly physical damage heavy group i tend to use.
Oops, that was a typo. I meant Lower Res X2 and Greater Mallison.
I don't think Greater Mallison stacks, although I have tried using it multiple times in a battle, because I am not sure if there is a duration, and/or if the most powerful foes can recover their saving throws... but I've never used 2 GMs from the same Spell Trigger. Actually my current Spell Trigger is: Greater Mallison, Pierce Magic and Lower Resistance.
I do know that Lower Resistance and Doom do stack, and I've seen more experienced players mention that they like to pack a Spell Trigger with Lower Resistance X3.
Wow I gotta try out Keldorn more it seems.
So Dispel works against any protections, assuming u can win the spell level battle?
Having just finished the whole saga, I think my most used 3rd level spells were Remove Magic and Skull Trap, in that order. One of the things that make Skull Trap useful late in the game is Time Stop -> Improved Alacrity. Their casting time is so low that with the Robe of Vecna you can unload all of them at once.
I never really liked MMM so much, but I'm a big fan of its big brother, Energy Blades, especially as a cleric HLA.
A strange fact: I used my mage counterpart of my M/T much more in ToB.
Ah yes... I stand correctly. MMMs always confused me somewhat, and remain a bit of a mystery. I just know they are typically very useful, and are often the only thing I got that can hurt particularly tough enemies.
I assumed they never missed cos MMs never miss. Thus when it doesn't do any damage, I assumed it was due to magic resistance.
I guess if it simply counts as a ranged weapon, that'd explain why Jin was much more accurate with his MMMs than Kang (my sorcerer Charname for the MP game), who misses quite a lot when fighting anything somewhat tough.
If you really want to experience how arcane magic is, just play with a small group (solo is even better).
That way you will be forced to use them to their full potential and you will realize how versatile they are, being able to fulfill all the roles in the party :
- Best defense : they are by far the best tanks in the game with some protective magic on and they can also use summons to help them tank. They can also protect themselves very efficiently against magic
- Best offense : whatever the situation, they can face it (lots of mob -> AOE, mages -> protection removal). That being said it's sometimes not very efficient, since magic has a very low dps against single ennemies
- Almost as much utility as a thief (scout using invisibility, open locks using knock, trigger traps while being protected to nasty effect (spelle immunity)
Due to the limited spell selection you get it is definitely worth reading spell descriptions in the manual and planning which ones to take as you advance. Some spells (e.g. Sleep) are great early on but become completely irrelevant later. Some start alright and stay useful. If a spell has a good save penalty (Slow has -4 to save) or no save then it'll often be a good pick.